Tag Archives: Slovenia

Most forms of gambling is illegal in Slovenia with a few highly regulated exceptions that are given concession from the government. Most notable are Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Lottery) and Športna Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Sport Lottery) in addition to real-world casinos and gambling places.

With growing popularity of online gambling these organizations as well as government are facing a problem with how to deal with insanely popular betting sites like Bwin, Expekt.com, bet-at-home.com. Government already tried to order ISP’s to block access to these webpages in 2006, but it turned out that they didn’t have legal ground for it so it failed.

That is why they decided to fix the law that would, among other things, require ISP’s to prevent access to web pages that would offer gambling related services. Failing to comply would result in fines from 7.500 EUR to 52.500 EUR and 1.500 to 10.000 for the person in charge. Parliament already approved the law on 18th of December 2008, but it got vetoed at the next stage in the process so they will have to vote on it again.

There are many troubling aspects of these recent developments:

From legal aspect it introduces censorship at the price of freedom of speech because part of the government decided that they need it. Who will be next to demand blocking of unwanted content?

From technical aspect it’s really hard if not impossible to block web pages. The only real approach would be using Deep Packet Inspection technique, that requires ISP to analyze each internet package violating privacy of the communication in the process.

It’s now up to the citizens and experts in the field to carefully analyze answers and proposed government changes to the law to make sure that it does not pass in its current form.

If you can read Slovenian, there are three excellent articles on this topic that you have to read:

@skatey and @Zealoth point out to a blunt copyright infringement on two very important web pages in our online space.

First is University of Ljubljana, that should act as a basic building block of our society. Evidently, they have no problems with stealing a stock-photo that costs less than a cup of coffee, that has still a watermark on it! That’s the same institution that will gladly expel a student for copying a paragraph of text without proper citation.

Second example is a Startup competition at startup.si (they don’t deserve a link), that once again had no problem with taking stock photo with a watermark:

These two sites, and the institutions that they represent, send a clear message to our students and entrepreneurs:

We don’t respect intellectual property and you don’t need to either. Take note of that in your future professional work and when you form your own business.

At #CLS09 we had a bunch of discussions and talks about unconferences and things related to them. To the ones that are new to this space – unconference is essentially a conference where the talks are given by the participants. BarCamp is a brand of general conference, mostly in geek space, that is done in unconference fashion. The history is richer than that, but you can read more about it in the wiki.

When I first started talking about BarCampLjubljana last year, it was mostly out of frustration that we don’t have barcamps. The us too wish and the general frustration with the perceived lack of geeks in the area. So began the process of education enough people about unconference style of event and finding people that helped organize the event as well as participants. I feel that this process was valuable in so far to teach the community about these types of tools and ways of interacting.

The real problem with this approach was that we focused too much on the tools and the process and not enough on the main thing – the content and the topic itself. Just like we can talk all the time about the development tools and programming languages that we use instead of the things that we’re actually building with them.

This showed in the pitch for BarCampLjubljana 1 and 2 – “lets meet and talk about whatever. Show us your recent work and the things that matter to you”. To make the things even worse, we didn’t think too much about who we invited as we basically distributed the message across a few of our usual channels: blogs, Facebook, Twitter and limited mailing lists and forums.

Looking at it now, the result was exactly what you would expect: about 100 of our friends gathered, they talked about their current projects and obsessions and they’ve got to know each other. It was interesting to listen about new projects, but there was only that much that kept community together. Lucky for us, the friends that we invited were fellow geeks from within the industry so there was enough of common ground that they understood each other and could talk to between themselves.

The second BarCampLjubljana presented this in clearer fashion – the talks had even less things in common, as the audience was largely the same, there was not much development in the 3 month period and the general feeling that something was missing was in the air. Everyone still had a great time, but we didn’t the fulfill the promise of BarCamps that we were supposedly bringing – pure and epic awesomeness unconferences.

So what now?

As we’ve learned how to do an unconference, I would propose that we let go of BarCamp’s all together and instead focus on topical unconferences. Instead of trying to force all topics on everybody we should start focusing on different topics and communities around them.

While Slovenia is small, different communities are still large enough that they can sustain an event or two on a yearly basis.

Instead of having BarCampLjubljana3, lets call it what we really want it to be – WebCamp. Lets not be afraid to talk hard-core tech stuff, with a bit of workflow and personal ranting about the industry mixed in. There is a whole range of topics from amateur sports to personal development that could benefit from such unconference.

While doing these events, we need to take into account a few things:

Smaller can be better. Thirty engaged individuals can benefit much more from each other than 300+ crowd. There is enough space in event space for both types of events.

Lets not be afraid of small communities. While we might know everyone in our field, we often don’t take time to actually talk to each other. Lets create opportunities to do this and we might discover a few new peers in the process.

Experiment with new things. Unconference is still a very abstract idea and lets see how different groups of people shape it.

We should build support framework for unconference style events, while still keeping it open and vague enough that the community has to make their own flavor.

Conclusion

So what’s left for BarCamp then? I see three possible ways that it can take shape:

As a meta unconference of hard-core unconference visitors. Just so that we don’t have ‘unconference about unconference’.

An unconference of thinkers and doers from different fields that want to see alternative view from different fields. We would probably still need a theme.

Entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs! That’s what we keep hearing from many different directions as the best approach to fight the recission, by creating new and innovative products. We at Zemanta know that it’s a long a tricky road and that every bit of advice and mentorship helps.

Being fortunate enough to be part of the first Seedcamp two years ago, we’re happy to give back to our local community by helping organize mini Seedcamp Ljubljana. It’s a shorter event in mid-May that is intended to provide 20 teams with mentorship, advice and opportunity to pitch to investors and get feedback. Getting this experience can be also extra empowering for the fall Seedcamp in London.

You can apply to Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana until 27th of April. You don’t have to be from Slovenia to apply as it’s an international event.

At this point I can already hint at OpenCoffe Club one day before the actual Seedcamp Ljubljana (13th May) and another BarCamp Ljubljana on Friday, 15th. But more details about this in a separate blog post.

Luka Birsa is founder of Visionect d.o.o, Slovenian hardware startup that’s working with e-paper and e-ink technologies and here are my notes from his talk with title – How hard it is to run a hardware startup? at Kiberpipa’s Open Lectures.